On the World Wide Web, there is a need to reference data from different sources inside documents. The standard way of referencing such data is through the use of URIs—or universal resource identifiers. Since a vast majority of the data lies inside relational databases, it is necessary to support a standard URI based access methods to such data. Typically, such applications are written using standard mechanisms like Servlets, which in-turn may execute SQL statements to retrieve and format the database data. Significant processing is often needed to convert the results of the SQL data into a standard format required by the user, such as extensible Markup Language (XML). XML is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard for representing data.
Based on the foregoing, it is clearly desirable to provide a less cumbersome mechanism and technique for allowing clients, such as browsers, that support accessing resources using URLs, to access relational data.